MUMBAI: Sheryl Sandberg's Facebook page may soon feature logs and photographs of a trip to India. The chief operating officer of Facebook and one of the world's most high-profile women executives will travel to India in first week of July, marking a rare visit from a top executive of a new-age company to India. It comes at a time sentiment about the country among overseas business executives has perked up following the election of a business-friendly government last month.

"She will be coming to India in July but we are not in a position to share the details yet," said an official from the company on telephone to ET. The company did not disclose any details of how long Sandberg plans to stay in India or if she plans to meet members of the new BJP-led government.

Sandberg's India visit will be the first by a member of the social networking behemoth's CSuite. Her boss and Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg has been photographed in China, but is yet to visit India.

Facebook is organising a media roundtable in Delhi with Sandberg, and sources said meetings with CEOs across sectors are also likely. What will be keenly watched is whether Sandberg's itinerary will include meetings with the new government, especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has used social media to the hilt in his communication strategy before and after elections.

The visit by Sandberg, 44, who oversees the firm's business operations, including sales & marketing, business development, human resources and public policy, and is said to be worth more than $1 billion (Rs 6,000 crore), will help affirm India's status as an important market for Facebook. The company, which mainly operates out of an office in Hyderabad, has more than 100 million users in India, making the country its second-largest market after the United States.

Facebook's growth in India has been the stuff of corporate dreams - when it first started operations in India in 2008, it had 8 million users and that number has risen manyfold in just about six years.

According to comScore, a research firm that analyses and measures digital habits, India has around 82 million internet users (desktop only, mobile not included) and 85 per cent of them are on social networking sites.

The internet user base is expected to grow 20 per cent year on year and those on social networking will increase by 25 per cent. Some 84 per cent of Facebook users in India access the site using smartphones, with a large chunk of them from tier II and III towns. This makes the site an attractive channel for marketers to target.

The company is looking at mobile as an important strategy to increase base. Facebook is creating customised apps for the Indian market, notably the 'missed call capability' that was rolled out first in India and then globally. Prior to joining Facebook in 2008, Sandberg was with Google and has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. According to reports, the company has 5,299 employees globally and a little over a 100 in India.

Sandberg, a Harvard Business School alumnus who also served as the chief of staff for Larry Summers in the Bill Clinton administration, has in earlier interviews mentioned that she worked in India for a health project with The World Bank in the early 90s, and also set up Google and Facebook offices in India.